“He’s many other things as well as unpunctual, Max.”
“Yes, I know. He’s also impulsive, reckless, conceited—”
“Max. Try to see people’s good points, eh? Like how he’s your friend and he got you a really great job.”
Max’s face hardens at the edges. “You’re no fun anymore. I used to enjoy bitching about him with you. But now that you’re shag—”
“Shush!” I snap, placing my index finger on his lips to silence him. “Don’t speak. Ever again. For the rest of your life.”
Stella walks back into the room with Ethan trailing behind her. I try to offer him a smile, but my face won’t work. Just as well, as he hasn’t even looked my way. No smile, no friendly wink, no apology.
“I hope you realise how completely fucking unprofessional you’ve been.” Stella swings around in the middle of the sitting room and both hands land firmly on her hips. “Two senior partners wanted to meet you today and – not for the first time – you showed yourself up. I’ve placed my trust in you, so that means you showed me up too.”
“I’m sorry. I was at the dentist. I’d got the time wrong and there was a queue and—”
“And it didn’t occur to you to pick up a phone or send a text or just get your stupid arse out of there and come to my brunch? I’ve got to level with you here, Ethan – I’m not convinced you could find your own arse with both hands and a torch at the moment.” She slams herself down in what I would classify a “boudoir” chair. It’s white with a roll back and tiny beaded buttons, and the two front legs sit on elegant golden castors. Ethan sits on the sofa next to Max. “Okay, we’ve wasted enough time already. Where are we at with pulling a creative department together?”
“Will Thornton and Paul Pinkerton from BMG are going to hand in their notice as soon as we’re ready to go,” I offer eagerly.
“That’s a great start. Get them to do it today,” Stella says. “Didn’t those two do the ad work for Sunta Motors? The ‘Drive of your Life’ one?”
I smile as I remember the simplicity of the copy on that ad and how it connected perfectly with Sunta Motors’ target audience. Then I get an idea. “Hey, you should let Daniel know we have Will and Pinkie on board. That would be a huge bonus for his pitch. Sunta will value the continuity of working with them.”
Stella shoots to her feet and grabs her mobile off the mantelpiece. “You’re not fucking wrong there. Sunta’s sales trebled the month that ad came out.” She sits back down and starts tapping away furiously on her iPhone. “Keep talking. Who else do we have?”
“Ruby Sloan has asked to join us. I’d love to give her Belle Oaks, but I still need to find an art director for her to partner with.”
“Good, I like Ruby. You trained her well last year,” Stella replies without looking up from her phone. “Do you agree, Ethan?”
“Me? Uhm . . . yeah, sure,” he says as if he’s been asleep the past five minutes.
Stella rolls her eyes but continues typing her message. “Don’t mind us, if you’d rather be somewhere else.”
Max gives me a nudge. When I turn to face him, he mouths precisely what I’m thinking, and that is “What the fuck?”
“What about you, Max?” asks Stella.
“Uhm . . . apparently most of my design colleagues are loyal to BMG.”
Stella raises one eyebrow. “When you say ‘most’ of your design colleagues are loyal, how many do you mean?”
“All of them.”
“All of them? You’ve spoken to every designer, illustrator and art-worker at BMG and you couldn’t convince anybody to join us?” Stella narrows her eyes. Her frustration is palpable. “How is that possible?”
“Well . . . I might have taken them all to Tanzen to try to convince them to work in my team.”
She looks blank. “Your team?”
Oh god. Please don’t let him ask her for a promotion. Not now.
“Yes, I . . . uhm . . . thought you might make me studio manager.”
“What? Why the hell would I do that? What kind of mind-melting idiocy would make me put you in charge of my art studio?” Max’s entire body shrinks with disappointment and I feel for him. Stella can be overly harsh sometimes. “And I know I’m probably going to regret asking this, but what exactly is Tanzen?”
“It’s a dance club,” Max replies sheepishly.
“I don’t understand. Dance clubs wouldn’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but why would it scare them off?”
“Well, I didn’t know beforehand, but they’d booked the Chippettes and . . . erm . . . they’re kinda like strippers.”
“Kinda?”
“Are.”
Her lips thin impatiently. “And?”
“And their party trick is audience interaction. With . . . objects.”
Stella rubs at the anxious lines that have developed on her forehead. “What did you do?” she asks jadedly.
“Me? Nothing really . . . Okay, I didn’t know this at the time but Albie Taylor’s grandmother died at the weekend and she’d given him this gold-plated watch. I thought it was just an ordinary watch when I wrestled him for it and gave it to this brunette who had the most amazing . . .” He uses his hands to convey the universal bloke gesture for “huge tits”, and I see the last tiny speck of respect Stella had for him evaporate into a fresh abyss of contempt. “He got the watch back – after it had passed through the brunette’s vagina attached to a string of fairy lights.”
“Okay, I don’t want to know any more,” says Stella, holding her hand up in despair. “Max, I’ll throw you a ‘senior’ title in return for the loyalty you’ve shown me, but no way in hell am I letting you manage people or work directly with clients.”
“Do I get a raise?”
She answers with the look of death, and Max shrinks even further into the sofa. “So it seems we urgently need studio staff, Ethan. Use a recruitment agency or run an ad or use bloody LinkedIn if you have to, I don’t care, but I need bodies in our studio. Can you check with Lucas Bartle to see how many artists are on Diablo Brown’s books? He’s always talking about a fantastic photographer he knows who’s on a sabbatical somewhere in Africa. God knows why she’s out there, but get her details. Whatever it takes. I need that studio manned and I need it yesterday.” Max opens his mouth as if he wants to say something, but one glare from Stella and he clamps it shut again. “And what about a secretary, Ethan? Daniel has lined up a girl he used to work with a decade ago, but you’re going to need an assistant. Especially now you’re leading on the JET Financial bid.”
Ethan finally pulls his head out of his arse and pays attention. “I haven’t given that much thought yet.”
“What about Lucille Monroe?” I say. We owe Lucille for coming to my rescue at BMG. Without her help I wouldn’t have been able to stop Ridley Gates’s reign of terror, and I promised her a position.
He shakes his head. “No way – I can’t. I mean, she’s a nice woman and I totally dig how she helped Violet, but she scares me. What about Zoe Callaghan?”
What the hell? Please tell me he didn’t just suggest asking his ex-girlfriend to be his bloody secretary? Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with him?
“Didn’t you have a relationship with Zoe?” asks Stella, no doubt eager to remind him of the no-sex-with-employees clause in his contract. Hell, I want to remind the idiot myself.
“Don’t worry about that. I never ride the same roller-coaster twice.”
Why does he think I’d be cool with him suggesting we hire his impossibly pretty and perfect ex? What planet does he live on? And if he’s comparing Zoe to a sodding roller-coaster, what does that make me? A helter-skelter?
“Okay, ask her, but if you have no luck, Lucille would be perfect. She’s a straight-talker, but she’s been in the job for thirty years so she knows what she’s doing.”
If he even thinks of asking Zoe, I’ll lobotomise him.
“Before you all got here, Daniel received confirmation we could move into Tribe’s Docklands pr
emises on Monday. Diablo Brown were already based in the basement of Churchill House, but the work being carried out on the other six floors we acquired is almost done.”
“We can be in that soon?” asks Ethan with a huge grin on his face.
“Yes, we can,” replies Stella. “We’ll be working alongside dust and drilling for another few weeks, but other than that we’re good to go.”
“Wow, this is great,” says Ethan. Max and I agree.
“So, first things first, all three of you need to box up your things in the temp office this afternoon and get ready for the move. I’ve booked a removal van to arrive first thing in the morning.”
We take that as our cue to leave, so we all stand up and start walking to the door.
“I don’t have anything in that claustrophobic office except a laptop. Can you guys get it for me? I found it so much easier working from home these past few months,” Max says.
“Are you saying you’re not going to come back with us and help pack up?” asks Ethan.
“I would, but I need to get back to my flat and bottle up the caramel ale I’ve been brewing.”
I can imagine the smell. The last time Max made some home brew, his flat reeked of sweaty feet and dog fart for a week.
We move into the hallway and Stella opens her front door for us. “One last thing,” she says as all three of us step out into crisp November sunshine. “We know BMG are tendering for JET Financial’s business too. Thanks to Daniel’s inability to keep it in his pants, their bid is already considerably stronger than ours, but I want to win this business. I need it. Do whatever needs to be done to get it for me.”
Ethan’s Adam’s apple bulges against his shirt collar. He assures her he’s doing everything he can, then the three of us say goodbye and head off in the direction of Sloane Square Tube station. We lose Max en route when he says he needs to go and buy some labels for his beer bottles. I have a feeling he’ll be trying to pass some of it on to me, and it’s going straight down the kitchen sink if he does.
I can’t help but laugh as we watch him sprint up the King’s Road to catch a bus. Ethan laughs too. I love his laugh. After his eyes, it’s the thing I love about him the most. But then I remember he’s just suggested hiring Zoe and I want to punch him to the ground.
“He looks like a bloody llama when he runs,” Ethan says, and I have to agree. Max has knocked knees which make his feet turn in like hooves. Do llamas have hooves? Or do they have toes like camels?
We walk on in silence, both of us squinting in the sunlight as streaks of gold bounce off boutique windows and brighten the dull grey pavement at our feet. “Shit, I nearly blew it today, didn’t I? I don’t know if I’m ever going to get this right, Vi. I know I’m a shit-hot ad man, but maybe that’s all I am. Maybe I’m not cut out for management.”
“Don’t be silly. You’ve got this.” My instincts make me smile encouragingly even though I still want to throttle him. I want to be a totally cool and un-jealous girlfriend, but I’m not either of those things. I’m the most jealous and uncool girlfriend in the world, and I hate myself for it.
4
“ETHAN, WE REALLY DON’T HAVE time to go to lunch.”
Who am I kidding? It’s only early afternoon, and it’s not like we haven’t made working into the night our thing over the years. We’ve always operated on our own schedule, but today I’d rather French kiss a slug than spend time with my secret boyfriend. I’m pissed off that he’s still acting out the lifestyle of a student on work placement, and I spent the entire Tube ride to Covent Garden wondering why he thinks hiring Zoe as his assistant could ever be acceptable. Tragically, the only plausible reason my brain could think of is that he must have some kind of uncontrollable, depraved boss–secretary fetish. Or he might just be incredibly dim.
“Vi, you know I can’t do anything on an empty stomach,” he says, ignoring my protests and heading into the pub. He stands at the bar, trying to catch the server’s eye and shoving a crinkly sauce-stained menu into my hands. “I’ll just have a sandwich. What are you having?”
“Nothing. I had brunch, remember?”
“You can have a drink,” he says. A waifish barmaid with crystal-blue eyes smiles coquettishly at him, tucking a long strand of wispy golden hair behind her ear. I roll my eyes so far back in my head I can see my angry, jealous brain.
Ethan orders an open ciabatta with harissa salmon and pea hummus, a side order of sweet potato fries and a pint. He turns to look at me, waiting for my drink order, but I’m too busy watching the simpering idiot who’s serving us. She appears to have transformed her mouth into the most ridiculous duck-pout I have ever seen. Two questions: why and why? Why is she contorting her face like that, and why the hell is it pissing me off so much?
I order a glass of white wine – a large one.
“Bit early in the day for that, isn’t it?” he says in a tone my pissed-off brain translates as condescending. “I don’t want to have to carry you back to the office.”
The barmaid giggles and I see red. It takes all I have not to ram his face into the bar and give Duckface a Chinese burn.
“Okay, Ethan, I’ll bite. Commenting on my lunchtime drinking choices – while you’re also drinking – makes you a bit of a knob. Unless that little joke was for the benefit of Miss Pouty McPoutface here.”
His face drops. The barmaid rolls her eyes and struts away. Ethan stuffs his hand in his pocket and pulls out enough notes to cover the ridiculously huge price of his ridiculously pretentious sandwich. Then he follows me and the angry cloud hanging over my head to a seat near the window. The Pig and Whistle is one of those pubs that considers itself a cut above the rest and proves its status via outrageous food descriptions such as “pan-fried potato slices with vine-ripened tomato emulsion”. Otherwise known as a plate of chips and ketchup. And when I say plate, I really mean a dainty silver miniature bucket lined with witty slogan-printed newspaper presented on a slate board. Ugh. I am so irritated by the stupid pub and its offensive bullshit menu that I consider finding the chef and giving him a piece of my mind.
“Feel like telling me what the hell that was about?”
He thumps my wine down on the table and my stomach leaps. For a second I check myself. Am I being pathetic? Jealous? Unreasonable? The absolute worst pain-in-the-arse girlfriend who ever existed? No man finds insecure attractive. Did my low self-esteem make me spew venom at the bar just now, or do I have good cause to want to nail his head to the table? I suspect deep down that it’s probably the former, and I wish I knew how to make it stop. I should be happy. I am loved. Finally somebody loves me. I repeat in my mind for comfort: I am loved. I am loved. I am loved. I deserve to be loved.
But I can’t look at him. I sigh into my wine glass and I try not to crack, but my eyes cloud over when I feel it. That same pain. Those same thoughts. I thought I was doing so well, but now I know I was fooling myself all along. Every time I’ve felt joy, or contentment, or even the slightest affirmation I was worthy of his love, I told myself those feelings had gone away, but they haven’t.
I don’t want to be her, but I am her. I will always be that child who lived in her bedroom, afraid the world outside would confirm she wasn’t good enough. I’m still that lonely teenager who cried herself to sleep because she had no friends. And I’m still a woman who hides behind witty remarks, refusing to let people in because she’s terrified they might find out that she’s everything her father said she was: You’re unpopular. You’re unfriendly. You always say the wrong things. You’re too quiet. You’re unlovable. Everything about you is wrong. You’re nothing. I’m ashamed of you. I wish you’d died instead of your sister.
Ethan takes a sip of his pint as he waits for me to speak. A nerve pulses at his jaw. He’s angry, and part of me wants nothing more than to burst into tears, tell him how sorry I am and let him kiss all my insecurities away. But I can’t. “I’m just tired of you telling me what to do.”
“What?” His brow creases with confu
sion. “You mean the wine comment? That was just a joke.”
“Well I’d prefer it if you didn’t make those kind of jokes.” I cringe at how sulky I sound.
“And I’d prefer it if you didn’t make those kind of outbursts. That poor girl didn’t deserve to be attacked by you, and neither did I. You made me look like a total wanker.”
“So you’re upset I got in the way of you hitting on a bar girl?”
His face reddens. “Violet, I hope you’re not suggesting I did anything other than pass the time of day with her.”
“Okay, Ethan, let me break this down for you.” My mouth doesn’t appear to have noticed how much my insides are cringing. The words keep tumbling out. “Firstly, you made a joke about me with her. Secondly, you placed your order while drooling into her chest. So, tell me if I have cause to be a little pissed off that my supposed boyfriend is acting like he’s done nothing wrong.”
“Violet, are you serious? I was just being pleasant, and I absolutely did not drool at her chest. She doesn’t even have a chest. Given I have full access to your magnificent chest, why the hell would I drool over hers?” His voice is loud and insistent, making me draw in a breath. “And what the hell do you mean by supposed boyfriend?”
“I mean that’s what you are.”
A discomforting silence hangs in the air between us as a waiter brings his sandwich and fries to our table. Ethan thanks the guy, then unravels a knife and fork from a bright red napkin. But he doesn’t start to eat. That angry nerve pulses at his jaw again. “Is this about me not telling Stella yet?”
Is it? I’m not even sure. “Partly.”
He picks up his knife and fork and starts to cut up the sandwich, but the ciabatta crust is too tough, so he opts to eat with his hands instead. He takes a bite as I have a drink. The cool liquid slides down my throat, momentarily flushing my anger away with it. I take another – larger – gulp.
It's Complicated (The Agency Book 2) Page 4
